Srini Devadas

The Edwin Sibley Webster Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, Devadas served on the faculty from 1988 and held the role of Associate Head of EECS with responsibility for Computer Science from 2005 to 2011. He worked in the areas of Computer-Aided Design (CAD), testing, formal verification, compilers for embedded processors, computer architecture, computer security, and computational biology, and co-authored numerous papers in these areas.

His work resulted in several significant awards, including the 1990 IEEE Transactions on CAD best paper award for work on synthesis for testability and the 1996 IEEE Transactions on VLSI Systems best paper award for work on power estimation. His papers on PUFs received best paper awards at ACSAC 2002, IEEE HOST 2011, and HOST 2012. He also received the 50th Design Automation Conference (DAC) award in 2013, as well as the Top 10 Cited Author Award, for being among the top ten most cited DAC authors in DAC's 50-year history. In addition, Devadas received the DAC Best-Paper Hat-Trick Award for winning DAC best paper awards three times.

At MIT, he and his students invented silicon Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs) in 2002, which are the technological basis of his co-founding of Verayo, a company focused on improving the security of computer hardware. Based on integrated-circuit manufacturing variation, Verayo developed secure RFID chips that are used in anti-counterfeiting applications and secret-key generation technology.

Devadas was elected a Fellow of the IEEE in 1999 for contributions to design automation and received the IEEE 2014 Technical Achievement Award, "For pioneering work in secure hardware, including the invention of Physical Unclonable Functions and single-chip secure processor architectures." He received his Bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering from IIT Madras (India). He received his M.S. degree in 1986 and earned his Ph.D. in 1988—both from the University of California, Berkeley.